Legal Aid Scheme: Discrimination

(asked on 25th March 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of legal aid applications in discrimination cases were successful in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Lucy Frazer Portrait
Lucy Frazer
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
This question was answered on 2nd April 2019

236582: The Legal Aid Agency’s (LAA) complaints procedure is published at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/legal-aid-agency/about/complaints-procedure. Complaints may be made by an applicant for funding, their legal representative, their MP, or anyone else involved in the case. Complaints are counted separately as they pass through the stages of the process. Data for the most recent five completed financial years is shown below.

Financial Year

Number responded to

2013/14

3,887

2014/15

2,785

2015/16

3,446

2016/17

3,727

2017/18

3,234

236585,236586 & 236587: The Legal Aid Agency measures and monitors its performance via a number of key performance indicators and corporate targets. For the processing of civil legal aid applications, this target has changed within the last five years. It is therefore not possible to answer these questions in precisely the format requested.

The LAA remained within the target for each reporting month between April 2014 and December 2018. Details of how these targets changed within the requested time period, and a breakdown by the categories of law enquired about, are included within the table below.

Financial year

Target - % within working days

Proportion out of target - Housing

Proportion out of target - Discrimination

Annual performance across all civil legal aid applications

2014-15

85%

7%

0%

Target met

2015-16

85%

8%

25%

Target met

2016-17

85%

4%

17%

Target met

2017-18

90%

4%

23%

Target met

2018-19*

80%

13%

56%

Target met

*(to Dec 2018)

The target for 2018-19 (onwards) also includes the amount of time taken by providers, as well as LAA caseworkers, thus referring to an “end-to-end” process. This is reflected in the figures for this financial year shown above. Previous targets referred to LAA caseworker time-taken only.

236588: the LAA’s published statistics are separated into quarters for each financial year. The most recent period available is July-September 2018. During that time, four applications for a legal aid certificate in the Discrimination category of law were received. Of those, one application was referred to the Exceptional and Complex Case Team for a determination.

236589, 236590, 236591, 236592: Case volumes for the LAA are published on a quarterly basis at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/legal-aid-statistics. These show the number of matters started at the ‘Legal Help’ stage, where the application process is devolved to the provider, and applications and grants for a legal aid certificate, where this is determined by the LAA. Therefore it is not possible to comment on the grant rate of Legal Help matters as only successful applications are referred to us.

Table 6.1 of the aforesaid published statistics shows the number of applications for a legal aid certificate which were made in each period, and of those the volume which were granted. Please note that an application may not proceed to being granted for a variety of reasons, for example being withdrawn, abandoned, rejected for administrative reasons, or refused where the relevant funding criteria were not met.

Table 5.1 of the published statistics show the number of matters opened at the Legal Help level by category of law during the period enquired about.

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